


gone are my blues

by layersofsilence



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Broadway, Fluff, M/M, Musical References, Musicals, Poor Life Choices, on everyone's part really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-13
Packaged: 2019-09-17 15:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16977459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/layersofsilence/pseuds/layersofsilence
Summary: Bucky storms into rehearsal like a literal thundercloud, astoundingly intimidating for someone who has a purpling bruise on their throat and whose movements are stumbling and unpredictable because he’s given up on looking where he’s going in favour of glaring at Steve.“This – thispunk,” he rasps out, once he’s close enough to the stage to be heard. In the acoustics of the theatre his newly-raspy voice is even more obvious than it’d been at the doctor’s; he sounds destroyed, rough and hoarse like someone’s taken sandpaper to his throat.or: the one where Steve has to substitute for Bucky on stage, to everyone's horror





	gone are my blues

**Author's Note:**

> this was meant to be for the happy steve bingo, but i'm eternally slow so i didn't finish it in time. here's posting it anyway, because why not :P

Bucky storms into rehearsal like a literal thundercloud, astoundingly intimidating for someone who has a purpling bruise on their throat and whose movements are stumbling and unpredictable because he’s given up on looking where he’s going in favour of glaring at Steve.

“Dare I ask?” Natasha calls from where she’s perfecting her lounging technique on top of the piano. As though she needs to perfect anything

“I _said_ I was sorry,” Steve insists, because he has, multiple times, and he’d even dragged Bucky to the doctor – a mighty feat, since Bucky was adamant that he wasn’t going to throw away a week’s wages, but Steve had pulled and cajoled and widened his eyes in that way Bucky can never resist, and the _doctor_ had said Bucky was going to be fine in a week or two, and they’d only lost a few days’ wages, to boot. Bucky had _nothing_ to complain about, and yet here they were.

“This – this _fucking punk_ ,” Bucky rasps out, once he’s close enough to the stage to be heard. In the acoustics of the theatre his newly-raspy voice is even more obvious than it’d been at the doctor’s; he sounds destroyed, rough and hoarse like someone’s taken sandpaper to his throat.

“Ohhhh no,” Nat says, sitting up and letting her skirt fall below her knees again. “Oh _no_. James, what – your _voice_!”

“ _Yeah_ , my _fucking voice_ ,” Bucky snarls.

“Well, the new raspiness is sort of sexy,” Steve says weakly, so flustered that even he’s slightly unsure of what he’s saying. Bucky’s glare intensifies, somehow, and Natasha rolls her eyes as Steve feels his traitorous cheeks flushing. It’s not like he hasn’t said worse at home, but they’re not at home.

“Can you sing?” she asks, and Bucky shakes his head desolately, one hand coming up to touch his throat.

“No,” Steve fills in for him. “The doctor said he shouldn’t sing for a week or two.”

“A week,” Bucky rasps. That makes both Steve and Nat roll their eyes.

“Two weeks,” Steve says.

“But even one week – you won’t be able to sing on opening night!”

“I _won’t be able to sing on opening night_ ,” Bucky repeats, still glaring at Steve.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Steve says, as plaintively as he knows how. Bucky’s glare softens, like he’d known it would, because Bucky is a soft touch, really. The fact that he follows Steve into fights is just a slightly strange way of showing that.

“What happened?” Nat asks, with enthusiasm that seems slightly inappropriate given the situation.

“I got into a fight,” Steve confesses. Natasha throws her hands up, which Steve thinks is a slight overreaction; he doesn’t get into that many fights, at least not now that he’s got steady work with a group he likes, who are willing to make considerations for him and his health when he needs it most. It only makes sense that when he’s working all day to prepare new shows before they close the old ones that he wouldn’t have the time to run into assholes, but it still vaguely surprises him, the drastic decrease in fights he’s gotten into.

“Again?” she asks, which, unfair. Apparently his views are not shared by the rest of the crew.

“They were –”

“You don’t want to hear about what they were doing,” Bucky rasps. “Just let everyone think I got –” he gestures wildly at the vicinity of his throat, “– _this_ in a heroic fight, alright?”

“It _was_ –”

“It’s really the least you can do, considering how _I’m_ the wounded party and it wasn’t even my fucking fight.”

Steve shakes his head. “It really wasn’t that bad,” he tells Natasha, and holds his hands up helplessly when Bucky glares. “And I won’t say any more on the subject, then, okay ? We’ll leave it at that. And after the fight I took Bucky to Erskine and he said that Bucky could’ve died, so really, I think we can chalk this one up as a win.”

“Oh, do you,” Nat says, in such a studiously uninterested tone that it almost sounds like she’s saying that Bucky ought to have died, and Steve bristles.

“You for _get_ ,” Bucky rasps, before Steve can say anything unwise and then possibly be killed in retaliation, “that our _show_ opens in _ten days_ , Steven _Grant_.”

“What about your understudy?” Steve asks.

“He’s having _twins_ ,” Bucky says, and to his credit he manages not to sound too disgusted by the prospect. He does like babies usually, Steve knows, and they’ve all been waiting to meet Erik’s babies; right now, though, it does rather seem as though the baby population of 42nd Street is conspiring against them. Of all the weeks for Erik to go out and have twins, of course it had to be this week.

“Of all the weeks to have twins,” Natasha says, echoing Steve’s thoughts almost perfectly.

“Pacing up and down a hospital corridor when he could –” Bucky breaks off to cough, and Steve thumps him on the back, “– could be a _star_ on _Broadway_. Nobody ever got famous by walking a line into a floor.”

“Alright, don’t go anywhere,” Nat says, and hops off the piano. “Give me a second to grab everyone. We need to talk about this.” She sounds calm but the way she storms into the wings yelling everybody’s names indicates another type of feeling entirely, and that alarm is reflected in the faint shouts she gets in return. There are a few alarmingly loud thunks and then Tony and Clint practically fall into Steve’s line of sight; Sam and Bruce follow them much more sedately.

“What’s going on?” Tony asks, with the kind of wild-eyed mania that means he’s neck-deep in a new crazy scheme for backstage mechanics. One look at the tired lines carved into Bruce’s face is enough to confirm that; Bruce is always at his most haggard when he’s trying to talk Tony out of building yet another elaborate mechanical set piece.

“Bad news,” Nat says, hopping back onto the piano and rearranging herself into a suitably sensual lounging position. “James lost his voice.”

Immediately, the room is filled with chaos, with noise: Tony shouts, Bruce exclaims, Clint nearly falls over and only saves himself by seizing the piano, which obligingly lets out a few loud, dissonant notes to add to the mess of sound. Sam just folds his arm and glares at Steve, which seems unfair; Steve is responsible, but Sam doesn’t know that yet.

“I didn’t lose my voice,” Steve hears Bucky grumble in the hubbub. “Steve lost it for me.”

“And Erik’s out having _twins_ ,” Tony groans. “Of all the weeks –!”

“He’s a family man, let him be with his family,” Bruce says, gentle but a little scolding all the same. This is true, and only fair; they had, after all, known that the arrival of Erik’s twins were imminent, and he’d made it quite clear that he wasn’t going to be available around the time of their birth. The group of them fall into despondent silence at this reminder, collectively wondering what to do next.

“I can sing both parts,” Natasha tries after a pause that grows increasingly desperate to be filled with noise, and is promptly shouted down by everyone else: this is a _duet_ , Romanov, there’s a _serenade_. It would be stupid to serenade yourself, everyone agrees as Nat rolls her eyes and mutters something about how she could do it. The room lapses back into silence.

“It’s okay,” Bucky says suddenly, his voice even worse in the silence, with so many new people around. “I got it.”

“Yeah?” Bruce asks hopefully. Bucky turns to Steve with a glint in his eye that has never meant good things, and sure enough, this one is just another to add to the pile of bad ideas he’s had.

“We’ll make Steve do it.”

“We’ll – we’ll _what_?” Steve yelps, physically jumping away from Bucky. “I don’t fucking think so!”

“Oh, it’s all fun and games until you have to be my understudy, I see how it is,” Bucky retorts.

“I never signed up –” he tries to protest, but it’s useless. Bucky’s got the idea in his head and the bit between his teeth and he’s not letting go of either anytime soon.

“I never signed up to get punched in the goddamn throat, either,” he snaps. “We’ve got ten days and we’re gonna make good.”

“Oh no,” Steve says, utterly uselessly. “Oh-hh no –” Bucky grabs his hand and drags him away anyway, and the rest of the crew just stand and watch; nobody seems particularly inclined to help, which, Steve has to admit, is probably what he deserves.

“Bucky,” he says, once Bucky has dragged the pair of them into his dressing room and shut the door behind them with an almighty noise, “You know I can’t sing, right?”

“Should’ve thought of that before –” Bucky gestures bitterly at his throat.

“That doesn’t change the fact that I can’t sing!”

Bucky waves this away, like it’s just that easy. “I’ll teach you.”

“I thought the doctor said to keep the talking to a minimum,” Steve says desperately; a weak last ditch effort, and they all know it. Bucky’s minimum was any self-respecting chatterbox’s maximum, sometimes. Especially when he’s trying to teach Steve to sing, if the two previous, disastrous attempts were anything to go by.

The first time had been a doomed attempt to alleviate Steve’s boredom during another interminable round of pneumonia; predictably, it’d gone absolutely terribly. The second time had been slightly better, after Bucky had landed his first starring role on Broadway and decided to celebrate by trying, of all things, to teach Steve to sing. That had gone slightly better, but it’d mostly been for Bucky’s enjoyment; Steve was fairly sure he’d remained as tone-deaf as ever.

Anyway, Steve thinks that he has fairly good reason to be wary of Bucky’s proposition now. Looking around, though, nobody is particularly sympathetic to his predicament, either avoiding Steve’s eyes or nodding along to what Bucky is saying. Sam shoots him a thumbs-up, because he’s a little shit. Steve can’t decide whose brand of unhelpfulness is the worst.

Bucky just goes to fetch the score from the piano, ignoring everyone else as he shoves the messy pile of papers at Steve’s chest, forcing him to grasp at everything awkwardly before it all spills to the floor.

“Tonight,” Bucky says. “Memorise that. We start tomorrow.”

~*~

“Memorise that,” Bucky had said, like it was that simple. Like they weren’t pages and pages of notes and words and melody; like they didn’t live together, the two of them. And like Bucky wasn’t the most pedantic asshole in the world when it came to his precious part: “It’s ‘we’re _young_ and _heal_ -thy’, not ‘ _we’re_ young and heal _thy_ ’, get it _right_ ,” he gripes hoarsely from the sofa. “Pet _ting_ , not _pet_ ting!” and “Bad _girl_ , not _bad_ girl –”

“Will you _shut up_?” Steve snaps finally at around eleven o’clock that night. He thinks it’s rather good of him to have managed to plug along for that long without saying something earlier; he’s been pacing and reciting and pacing some more and Bucky has been interjecting at every possible opportunity and even at some impossible ones.

Now he raises his arms above his head, widening his eyes innocently. “Just tryin’ to help,” he rasps, and wrinkles his nose when Steve scoffs.

“Tryin’ to be a pain in my ass, more like.”

“Hey!” Bucky says, the utter sincerity in his face somewhat undermined by his raspy voice and the way he immediately wiggles his eyebrows before breaking off to cough and frown.

“Oh, please,” Steve says. “Cut me some slack, I’ve never done this before.” And he has a new appreciation for how easily Bucky seems to be able to do it, with seemingly no time passing between his first read of the score and his going about his day around the flat singing and reciting lines from memory. He’s not about to admit that, though.

“I just want this show to be the best that it can be,” Bucky says, all wide-eyed sincerity despite the rasp in his voice. “And since someone went and got the leading man punched in the throat –”

“Am I _ever_ going to live that down –?”

“It’s on you to make this show the best thing that audience is ever gonna see,” Bucky says, and this time he means it.

“Hey,” Steve protests weakly, and the enormity of what he is about to do hits him all at once in Bucky’s earnest bright gaze. The sound and lighting are – well, of course if the sound and lighting don’t work their acts suffer, but nobody in the audience is staring at Steve as he works the switches. Not many people are going to be analysing the choice of filters and sound effects that Steve uses; if they work, they work, and that’s the end of it. On _stage_ , though – on stage it’s going to be a completely different story. “Oh,” he says dumbly, and sits down quite heavily on the floor.

“Hey,” Bucky says, real gentle, and properly sincere this time, coming closer to kneel next to Steve and put a warm hand on his shoulder. “You okay?”

“Oh no,” Steve says, his brain a stuck record. People are going to see his _face_. They can take direct action if the show is awful, even! Steve is shielded from tomatoes and rotten fruit backstage working the sound and lights. He has never wished more fervently that the fourth wall was literal. “Oh _no_.”

“Hey,” Bucky says again. “You can do it.”

“I know I can do it,” Steve snaps, anxiety making him prickly when what he should probably say is that he definitely can’t do it, not at all, can Bucky find someone else, maybe? Bucky just hums soothingly and rubs Steve’s shoulder, which Steve would definitely move away from if it wasn’t so absurdly comforting. Bucky’s hand is unnaturally warm.

“It’ll just be for a few performances,” Bucky says.

“I know,” Steve mutters. “But – opening night, Buck.”

Bucky strokes his hair in smooth motions, presses a kiss to the area, warmth filtering through to Steve’s skull. “I know,” he says. “You can do it, just for a bit.”

~*~

If there was one thing that Steve could change about his job, it would probably be a ban on letting Tony Stark build anything; he’s constantly creating ever more fantastic mechanical setpieces for their shows, pieces that Steve has to somehow fit on the stage or point-blank reject, pieces that need to be flatteringly lit, pieces that cause untold stress during rehearsals as everyone learns to step precariously around the new thing. The stress, admittedly, is mostly Steve’s, because everyone else seems remarkably blasé about Tony’s shoddily constructed towers of metal sticks – even Bucky, and Bucky had been the one whose arm had nearly been chopped off when someone’s foot had caught the French Revolution setpiece the wrong way.

The point is that Tony was a royal, smug pain in Steve’s ass, which meant that if Steve was willing to admit that he’d been useful he must have been _really damn useful_.

“I know, I know,” Tony says, waving one airy hand and immediately making Steve resolve never to admit what he’d been thinking. “I’m amazing, you love me, et cetera – try it out. Go on, do it.”

Steve raises the microphone to his lips. “Uh,” he says into it. Not an inspired choice of words, to be sure, but it echoes out from the back of the stage anyway, an _uh_ loud enough to have the room shaking. Steve yanks the microphone away from his lips as Tony fiddles with a set in his hands.

“Try that again,” he commands, not even bothering to pretend to be a little apologetic about the way that Steve now has pretty much everyone in the theatre glaring at him.

“Testing,” Steve whispers into the mic. The s-noise seems to slither around the room, but otherwise it works this time, the rest of the statement about as quiet as he is; when he clears his throat and says, “Testing,” again, it’s only as loud as it would be if he was standing on the stage and projecting his voice the way Bucky has been trying to teach him to do.

The happiness and relief of it is instant, and marvellous; Steve won’t go on stage. Steve won’t even appear on stage. He thinks he may slump a little from the force of it.

“There you go, then,” Tony says, all satisfied smugness as he folds his arms and rocks back on his heels. “You’re _welcome_.”

“Thanks,” Steve says begrudgingly, and Bucky nods and points from next to him. Tony nods and points back, and then whirls away to take himself back down to the pit where he’s working on his newest metal monstrosity.

Bucky jabs Steve in the shoulder, and when Steve turns to look at him he shakes his finger warningly and stabs it in the direction of the script. Steve sighs.

“I know,” he says. “I still have to memorise the words and the songs, right?”

They’ve made a deal, the two of them, that Steve will try to interpret Bucky’s flailing hand gestures and in return Bucky will shut the fuck up like the doctor had recommended that he do. Steve must not have interpreted well enough, because Bucky glares harder and rasps, “Sure, but you need to memorise them the way _I_ say them. We gotta sync up.”

“If anyone can do it, it’s us,” Steve says. “Shit, Bucky, I’ve known you since you had knobbly knees and a gap in your smile. Have a little faith.”

Bucky rolls his eyes expansively and points at Steve’s mouth.

“Easy for me to say?” Steve asks, and Bucky nods, one sharp downwards jab of his chin. Steve just rolls his eyes, and watches Bucky’s grumpy façade crack just a little. “Come on,” he says then, taking Bucky by the elbow. “We’d better tell the others.”

Bucky’s snort makes it abundantly clear that he’s aware that Steve is selfishly motivated; he just wants to make it abundantly clear as fast as he can that he’s not going to have to perform on stage. Still, he doesn’t protest beyond a roll of his eyes as he’s dragged along, and even that comes out fond.

~*~

Everything seems so much easier with Tony’s new and wonderful solution. It seems so much more manageable to focus on intonation, on saying – or singing – words as Bucky would say them, when he does not also have to worry about performance, about body language, about his expression; when he knows he’s going to be safe backstage and nowhere near the bright glow of the stage lights. When he knows that he can have a copy of the script in front of him as he needs it, no matter how much Bucky scowls and mutters that he should have the thing memorised front to back and sideways to boot.

Bucky even tries positive reinforcement for a bit, like Pavlov: every time that Steve recites a line without a script in front of him Bucky will lean over and give him a kiss. Steve does an excellent job of pretending not to know what is going on, in his own humble opinion.

Given how long they’ve known each other, given how extensively Bucky rehearses and mutters to himself and practices his lines at home, it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that Steve is excellent at miming Bucky.

Somehow, though, he is still greeted with wide eyes and open mouths when he does it through Tony’s microphone. “What?” he asks defensively.

“You’re good,” Sam says from the piano he’s sitting at, Natasha nodding from where she’s perched on top of it.

Steve shrugs, tries not to blush. “I have to put up with his endless rehearsing at home,” he says. “Stands to reason I’d pick something up.” Bucky makes a strange noise low in his throat and promptly starts coughing, because he clearly doesn’t know how to take care of himself, the asshole.

The two of them make a good team, as they always have; Bucky has the most wonderfully expressive body, Steve knows it from hundreds of hours of watching him rehearse at home, pacing around the couch with longing twists of his shoulders and passionate movements of his hands as the script demands, in a way that is not entirely natural but conveys all the natural emotion in the world. Supporting that with his voice is not such a hardship; is not even hard, really. Bucky is doing all the work out on that stage, a silent film star in his own right as he urges Natasha’s character to embrace him.

“Nah,” Bucky rasps, when Steve informs him of this. “You’re doing half the work back there and you know it.” 

“There’s a reason film was popular before sound was a thing, Bucky,” Steve tries to protest, but Bucky isn’t having a word of it.

“Yeah, and there’s a reason radio was popular before talkies became a thing,” Bucky retorts. Steve opens his mouth, shuts it helplessly. Bucky looks far too smug.

“Well, we could go back further to mimes –”

“Shut up, Steve,” Bucky says, and his voice is fond. “Just accept you’ve got important work and you’re doing a great job, a’right?”

“Well,” Steve says again, flustered. “If _Bucky Barnes_ says I’m doin okay –”

“Better than okay, punk,” Bucky says, what is definitely a smirk touching his lips as he sees how Steve struggles to deal with the compliment. The jerk. “Great, really. Or didn’t you hear me say so? Do we gotta send you over to Erskine –?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Steve says, and throws the script and corresponding score at him. Bucky just raises an eyebrow as the papers scatter all over the floor, and Steve flops backwards on the couch, eyes fixing themselves firmly on the ceiling so they don’t have to look at the mess he’s just made and is, inevitably, going to have to clean up, because Bucky Barnes is an asshole. A paper-throwing-provoking, unhelpful asshole.

~*~

Steve isn’t expecting a lot from opening night. They’re working with a handicap, after all, and no matter how many wheels and pulleys Tony adds to the microphone so that Steve’s disembodied voice can follow Bucky around the stage, no matter how well Steve can imitate Bucky’s voice and vocal mannerisms, it’s still not going to be _Bucky’s_ performance.

He’s expecting a lukewarm reception from the audience, which isn’t the best thing to get on opening night but the rest of the show is good enough that he thinks they’ll be able to earn it back over the rest of their run; he’s _not_ expecting the applause that they get when the curtain goes down.

Bucky nearly tips sideways off the stage, glowing the way he does after a successful show, stumbling and grinning and almost high with the thrill of a job well done. The noise of the audience follows him into the little lighting booth where Steve is sitting wide-eyed, staring at the sea of clapping people.

“Come out,” Bucky says, holding out a hand. Hs voice is better than it was, but he’ll still need a few more days, and with the way people are reacting to this show it looks like he won’t mind keeping this arrangement for that long. “Come take a bow.”

“Oh, I can’t –” Steve tries to protest, but Bucky ignores him completely, hauling until he’s on his feet, darting in to give him a quick, thrilling kiss before pulling the two of them towards the door. And maybe some of his euphoria is rubbing off on Steve, because Steve doesn’t even bother protesting; he just follows Bucky out on stumbling feet, raises one hand towards the wall of noise in front of him and keeps his other clenched tight around Bucky’s.

He’s left the spotlights on; they’re shining into his eyes, so he closes them and tips his head up, squeezes Bucky’s hand tight and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> basically all of my knowledge of broadway comes from the 1930s backstage musicals, whose songs i blatantly used here:  
> [we're in the money](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJOjTNuuEVw) (gold diggers of 1933) for the title, with [young and healthy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSvQtAnh_CI) (42nd street) and [petting in the park](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7sGPbapvxU) (gold diggers of 1933) as the songs steve was trying to learn.
> 
> usually i advertise my [tumblr](https://layersofsilences.tumblr.com/) here, but given the recent fuckery over there here's my [dreamwidth](https://layersofsilence.dreamwidth.org) account as well, which has a masterpost of the other places i'm on if anyone wants to look me up <3


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